Reassembling Rubbish

How do we know e-waste? Electronic discards, the double social life of methods, and their gamut of Othernesses.

I opened this path with Law's notion of the double social life of methods. As we've moved along I've shown a variety of ways that particular methods relevant to the study of e-waste make some versions of it present (that dual movement of making some things present and others absent) - documentary photos and video bring forth environmental harm, elicit feelings of empathy and guilt; trade statistics manifest visible flows between states - and all these methods make absent other ways of knowing waste. Common to all of them, for example, is the fabrication of e-waste as an end-of-pipe problem, that is, something that happens only after users (most often understood to be consumers or households or sometimes, but less frequently, businesses and institutions) rid themselves of their electronic items. So other ways of cutting into 'the' e-waste problem (say, as one of design or raw material extraction or manufacturing discards or toxic body loadings for assembly line workers) disappear. Sometimes this disappearance is a manifest absence, that is, it is more or less a conscious choice by researcher so as to focus on a particular problem so construed. Other times it isn't. But we shouldn't forget that for Law (2004, 2009) the Othernesses that are entangled with the double social life of method include what I tried to clarify as 'non-manifest absences', absences that happen, that are in some sense necessary, but about which a researcher is not - and indeed, within a given method assemblage fundamentally cannot - be aware of without a switch to another method assemblage altogether.

Again the point may seem abstract, but it is a crucial one for coming to appreciate the work that methods - any methods - do toward partially formatting the thing they claim to only study, that is, the work they do toward rendering determinate a world (or worlds) that might be fundamentally indeterminate. Here is an example of what I mean. In 2011, a group of Chinese scientists published a paper describing a novel bacterium "isolated from a sludge sample collected from an electronic waste recycling site" (An et al 2011: 9148). This bacterium is able to biodegrade tetrabromobisphenol-A (TBBPA), a brominated flame retardant. In effect, this bacterium, an unknown strain until An et al's (2011) study, can metabolize and breakdown a compound that has been shown to be a human endocrine disruptor, accurately toxic to algae, mollusks, crustaceans, and fish; it leaks into and bioaccumulates in air, water, and soil. Yet, this bacterium, a form of life of which we have little understanding and over which we have little control, has learned or is learning to live off of compounds in discarded electronics (and much else besides, TBBA is a widely used flame retardant). Understanding this much brings us to Othernesses not just beyond how we know e-waste, but fundamentally outside our capacity to know at all. As Clark and Hird (2013) remind us, human life is premised on, not just interdependent with (though it is that too), bacterial life. There are possibilities for Othernesses of e-waste here that are so Other they are fundamentally unknowable. Indeed, it seems indeterminacy - the opposite of what our methods attempt to institute - is a fundamental property of that which is enacted as waste (Hird 2013). And what of the highly asymmetrical ramifying relations (very firmly in favour of bacterial, rather than human flourishing) that might result? What might these 'dark ecologies' (Clark and Hird, 2013) be?

This page has paths:

This page references: